This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

by Daniel J. Levitin

The problem, however, is that the temporal resolution of fMRI isn’t particularly good because of the amount of time it takes for blood to become redistributed in the brain—known as hemodynamic lag. But others had already studied the when of musical syntax/musical structure processing; we wanted to know the where and in particular if the where involved areas already known to be dedicated to speech. We found exactly what we predicted. Listening to music and attending to its syntactic features—its structure—activated a particular region of the frontal cortex on the left side called pars orbitalis—a subsection of the region known as Brodmann Area 47. The region we found in our study had some overlap with previous studies of structure in language, but it also had some unique activations. In addition to this left hemisphere activation, we also found activation in an analogous area of the right hemisphere. This told us that attending to structure in music requires both halves of the brain, while attending to structure in language only requires the left half.